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Friday, February 08, 2008
Larval Subjects on Pedagogy
I highly recommend that you check out Sinthome’s response to my tag about teaching. He teaches philosophy, and this remarkable post synthesizes the Socratic value of provocation, alienating others from their habitus, with the healthy alienation and skepticism many of us felt during our own student years—something to which it is hard to remain loyal as teachers.
Comments
I’m increasingly bothered by the pedagogy or poetics of provocation, alienation, etc.
Why is it that the poet and his friends are never alienated by the work of their coterie? It’s always some straw-man of the middle class taken as the object of alienation.
Likewise, we assume that our students need to be alienated from their assumptions, all the while assuming what our students believe, and all the while assuming that their beliefs are false because they are not our beliefs. If our students want to be corporate slaves, it’s like we take some sick pity on them: “O dear, Little Nell, let me disabuse you of your desire to work in an office and teach you to love art/philosophy/graphic novels!”
So I worry when the pedagogy of alienation justifies a pedagogy of indoctrination: if Student A loves capitalism, he needs to be alienated. But if Student B loves Marxism, he treated as good to go.
Now, I’m sure all of us—myself included—who think in terms of a pedagogy of alienation like to consider it in terms of a Socratic dialectic: assume nothing, question everything, etc etc. But alienation is an affect, a feeling, and that should not be the goal of our teaching.
Luther,
For me, alienation is perspectival rather than (always) political. For example, the poetic work of defamiliarization, which can happen without any political meaning, is a form of alienation: the familiar becomes strange. But also, in politics as in other things, the norm matters: however much I might like to indict Teacher C for treating Student B so favorably, Student B is hardly anywhere to be found.
I agree that we should aim to produce knowledge, not feeling (especially not freely flowing clichés like “passion"). But understanding “alienation” the way I do here, it is a frame for new kinds of knowledge, and not merely emotional discomfort. In fact, in my comment to Sinthome, I tried to tackle the emotional complexity of induced alienation—Socrates’s merry band of followers, etc.
Joseph—You’re right. I made it seem like all alienation effects are used in the name of politics.
But even still, I wonder about the gap between the stated goal of “making the familiar strange” and the actual readership of much radically alienating literature. Celan, for example, is mostly read by folks who aren’t really bothered by his style. They go in expecting strangeness, they are already open to the unfamiliar. Otherwise, most readers would simply throw up their hands, declare they don’t get it, and move on.
I wonder if being “mildly alienating” isn’t more effective than making alienation the ultimate goal of a poetics or a pedagogy. The word I’d use then is “skeptical” rather than “alienating,” the former implying an cognitive attitude toward knowledge and sense data and not an existential situation, experience, or feeling.
I’m thinking about this after teaching O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” to a junior high class. Her ability to let the reader in and then upset the expected seems far more effective than, say, Kathy Acker’s experimentalism, which always polarized my college classes: either the student was predisposed to like her complete disturbance of convention or s/he just felt turned off by it.
I’m shifting from reading to teaching, in part because as an English teacher, they are quite connected. So if we took a look at British Fiction syllabi, I suspect we’d see a lot of Kureshi or Rushdie but not much Peter Ackroyd, because the teacher identifies “alienation” with “reading progressive and multicultural literature.” But really, Ackroyd’s radical conservatism would upset far more expectations than Rushdie’s fairly conventional anti-conventionalism. It was far weirder to me, upon recently reading Ackroyd’s *London*, to find someone in 2001 suggesting that the poor will simply always be with us, urging sympathy but showing the futility of trying to force change on the city. Professors would assume that their students would automatically agree with Ackroyd, but I’m not sure about that. I’m making this sound like the typical complaint that conservative texts are ignored by the academy, but I feel like there’s something odder in a writer like Ackroyd than mere political binaries, something we see in Ackroyd’s literary heroes: Shakespeare, Johnson, Blake, Dickens, Conrad. It’s a ferocious independence of mind that upsets simple political terms. A true dialectical model, and not a desire to alienate the fat middle class spectre that haunts the avant-garde imagination.
Luther, you write:
“Likewise, we assume that our students need to be alienated from their assumptions, all the while assuming what our students believe, and all the while assuming that their beliefs are false because they are not our beliefs. If our students want to be corporate slaves, it’s like we take some sick pity on them: “O dear, Little Nell, let me disabuse you of your desire to work in an office and teach you to love art/philosophy/graphic novels!”
So I worry when the pedagogy of alienation justifies a pedagogy of indoctrination: if Student A loves capitalism, he needs to be alienated. But if Student B loves Marxism, he treated as good to go.”
There’s nothing necessarily political about the production of alienation in the classroom. As I see it, some sort of alienation is necessary in the philosophy question. The familiar world of everyday life is just that, familiar. It’s a world where chairs are chairs, rocks are rocks, values are values, people are people, and so on. If students are to understand the material we read and the questions the texts are asking, it’s necessary for the world to become a bit mysterious. Things must stop seeming so obvious. It’s only when we begin to see the contingency of things, that they could be otherwise, that we can set about the arduous work of explaining them. This is all I mean by “alienation”: defamiliarizion. I should also emphasize that I work very hard *not* to engage in any sort of political indoctrination or reveal my own philosophical positions in the classroom. As I see it, my aim should be to assist students in posing *their* questions with greater clarity and developing more forceful arguments. Over the course of the semester there will always be days where students will implore me to state my own positions. But my positions aren’t relevant to this process. The point is for them to develop their positions. Along these lines, I advocate strenuously for whatever material we’re exploring, seeking to dramatize it and bring to life the set of questions that motivate these particular questions (generally the questions that lead to a philosophy aren’t stated in the philosophical text itself… you have to muck around quite a bit with life, history, etc). This means that one day I might be strongly advocating for, say, Adam Smith and the next week Marx. The aim isn’t to *convince* the students of one position, but to bring to life the framework within which these positions become plausible to the thinker *so that the student might begin critically evaluating the philosophers position and their own positions, perhaps developing something new in the process*. My hope is that perhaps the students can be brought to appreciate the various philosophers we study, even if (and I hope they don’t) they don’t advocate the positions of these philosophers by the end of the semester.
Perhaps a brief word on the material I generally teach. Generally for my intro class I teach a handful of Plato’s dialogues, some Augustine, perhaps Epictetus and Epicurus, Descartes or Hume, Kierkegaard, Kant, and perhaps some Sartre at the end of the semester. If you’re familiar with this reading list then you’ll note that it’s hardly a political indoctrination designed to turn students against capitalism or some other ideological agenda. Nonetheless, all of these thinkers take the familiar and develop it in such a way that it defamiliarizes. At this point the independence of mind you refer to begins to become possible.
I found Sinthome’s post a marvelous though at times intimidating response to the tag prompt (though I’m not certain I wholly agree with him about Plato’s Academy—Plato, after all, was not disinterested about political concerns as evidenced by many of his dialogues and by his attempts to influence the leader of Syracruse—further, in the later academy, students often “dropped in” for a year or two to acquire preparation for civic/political life). However, his certain point about “alienation” or forcing cracks is very important.
I think Luther is correct, though, in his concerns about the attempts of many pedagogues to replace what they preceive as flawed or uncritical or unthought constructions of reality with their own correct ones. I see this all the time; at heart these attempts are arrogant and often signs of self-delusion. I also appreciate Luther’s emphasis of a true dialectical model (though I might not use the word “true"). At the heart of Socratic dialectic is a profound humility, a humility sometimes not emphasized in discussions of dialectic as found in the Socratic dialogues. Dialectic requires a genuine uncertainty; otherwise it’s a tool of rhetorical persuasion. The dialectical journey is one that both teacher and student undertake, and it’s a journey that by its very nature requires that we not know the destination.
I agree with Sinthome’s comments about how teachers often talk about their students. On a personal note, I now refuse to sit in reserved faculty sections of cafeterias or whatnot because I’m so tired of all the cliched complaints about students—complaints that, as Sinthome observes, unintentionally say far more about the teachers than the students.
Sinthome: “As I see it, some sort of alienation is necessary in the philosophy question. The familiar world of everyday life is just that, familiar. It’s a world where chairs are chairs, rocks are rocks, values are values, people are people, and so on. If students are to understand the material we read and the questions the texts are asking, it’s necessary for the world to become a bit mysterious.”
I’m going to try to extend Luther’s critique against this a little bit. I’ve taught physics, and in physics, you certainly have to defamiliarize students with ordinary objects in a certain way: light doesn’t behave as you would expect it to, particles are waves, etc.—all of relativity and quantum physics and cosmology produces situations in which everyday intuitional physics doesn’t work. But you don’t do this just because it seems like a good idea. All of these developments in physics were introduced by scientists who needed to introduce them, because the preceeding science didn’t model reality very well.
It’s unclear to me whether the same kind of thing is really necessary in the humanities. Defamiliarization became an avant-garde aesthetic goal in the early 20th century, and I can see how it would be an attractive goal to humanities professors who read a great deal. But it’s not the only aesthetic goal.
In terms of philosophy, it seems to me to claim a bit too much to say that defamiliarization is necessary in order for students to see the contingency of things. I think that it’s possible for students to imagine the unfamiliar without necessarily being taught to see the familiar as unfamiliar. It’s not even clear to me which skill is of more use, generally; someone who is adept at defamiliarization often has no need to imagine anything really different, because they think that they can see difference all the time.
Rich, I think there’s quite a big difference between the physics classroom and the humanities classroom. Generally, at the lower levels, the students in the sciences are not doing research. They accept the textbook and scientists as an authority and the task is to simply integrate the material set out in that textbook. The space of the question need not be opened at all. In the philosophy, by contrast, no such textbooks or authority exists. And it’s not an issue of simply integrating the material in say Hume or Plato. In this context, it’s necessary to open the space of the question so as to grapple with the material. When does knowledge become a question? And why does it become a question in this particular way (and in a different way for Kant and yet another way for Descartes)? When does virtue or morality become a question or a problem? And why in these particular forms for Epicurus or Epictetus? A space of questioning must be produced before any of these materials can be worked with. In the case of knowledge and reality, introductory students often begin with the rather vague thesis that knowledge is what the scientists have and reality what they teach us, whereas in the case of questions of ethics they tend to begin with the thesis that virtue is whatever their parents have taught them. Or, more commonly, they begin with some sort of relativistic position: “it’s all opinions.” None of these things provoke questions yet as the answers have already been accepted and do not seem problematic. It becomes necessary to open a space of the problematic.
Think of it in terms of driving long distances. What happens? You zone out. Mile after mile passes without you thinking much about what you’re doing. You can even arrive at your destination without recollecting the distance you’ve traveled. “What happened all that time?!?” When do you become aware during driving? When another car approaches a bit too closely, when an animal jumps out, when you see a confusing sign or roadwork. That is, thought is produced when the routines of habit break down. Something similar to this must take place in the philosophy classroom as well, that’s all. Arguably something similar has to occur at the *origins* of scientific thought as well. When does the world present itself as being in need of explanation? Following Kuhn, when does a paradigm get overturned (i.e., when do we begin to see that the paradigm is no longer adequate)? For Eratosthenes, for instance, it’s when he notices a report that one day during the year sunlight shines directly down a well in one town but not in his own town. This calls into question a familiarity of the world, it’s flatness.
I’m not sure why you bring up the avant-garde or aesthetics in relation to what I’m talking about.
I don’t have time to read everything carefully right now, but there’s a big part of a generation which was born alienated. A lot of 30-year-olds grew up with discouraged leftist parents and ex-hippies like me, and they’re hip and tolerant and ironic and left and angry and so on, but they really don’t have anywhere to go with that.
In some cases they get into weird lifestyle trips. In some cases they get into the epater-the-liberal mode and become libertarians or racists. Sometimes they just become alienated mercenaries and go for the bucks.
It varies tremendously from the city to the country, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and from region to region, but I think that hip cynicism is more or less as prevalent among people under 35 as unthinking conventionalism or right-wing dogma, and with a lot of people there’s a sort of sickly mix of all three.
I don’t think that more alienation is what they need.
To piggyback on Rich’s comment:
Joseph Novak, the noted Cornell researcher and head of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, developed the use of concept mapping in science education.
Studies of MIT students showed Novak that when they mapped out their understanding of certain key concepts in physics, their understanding was deeply flawed. They had “learned” enough to succeed at MIT, but they really didn’t grasp the concepts on which their future careers would be based.
Novak found concept mapping useful because it brings to light the faulty understanding a student might have. Whereas some educators think of learning in terms of what Freire called the banking model (student as empty box, knowledge as stuff that goes in the empty box), Novak concluded that the teacher must first uncover the student’s previous knowledge, the particular ways students map out certain ideas. Only then can the teacher untangle the student’s ideas and reconstruct them along truthful or accurate lines.
(More on Novak and concept mapping at: http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications/ResearchPapers/TheoryCmaps/TheoryUnderlyingConceptMaps.htm
Maybe we’re just disagreeing over terms, but I don’t see this pedagogy as defamiliarizing or alienating. And while it might seem theory-heavy, it’s actually quite simple. Begin by uncovering a student’s preconceptions and assumptions, so that new material isn’t assimilated along old, mistaken lines. When teaching *The Great Gatsby*, I begin by uncovering my students’ assumptions about money and class status. This way, they can compare their own ideas to Fitzgerald’s. That is to say, my students tended to equate money with class status, whereas Fitzgerald suggests that class is as much about tradition and family as it is about capital.
I didn’t ask my students to change their ideas about class. I instead asked them to see their ideas as objects of thought. I asked them to be reflexive. The same goes for teaching the basic concepts of literary study. I don’t seek to undermine my students’ everyday notions of plot. But I try to bring them to light, so that when I teach them the technical idea of plot in literary analysis, they can see the differences.
Does this make sense?
I had wrote a long post clarifying my position earlier, but it seems that it disappeared (I backtracked after posting it, so maybe that had to do with it). Luther, what you describe is actually very close to what I’m getting at. As I mention in the original diary, the term “alienation” is used as a provocation, not something to be taken literally. I will say, however, that I think the sciences are often different; especially at the introductory level. Students often simply accept the authority of the textbook and scientists, assimilating the concepts and equations. In philosophy, at least, the space of the question and problem has to be opened. This is something that isn’t found in the text itself, but rather requires a form of pedagogy that explains why these figures got so worked up about these questions, how they responded, etc. That requires reference to a number of historical and sociological issues. I confess, however, that not teaching sciences myself I could be mistaken in this stereotype of what goes on in the science classroom.
It’s not like my teaching in the sciences is very extensive—I was a T.A. for introductory college courses for a few years, for which I received absolutely no training at all by the way which I hope isn’t the case in the humanities—but I think that scientists tend to depend on the material itself to open the students’ worldview. At the lowest-common-denominator, but still effective, level, this is Carl Sagan’s stereotyped intonation of “billions and billions of stars”; just presenting what is currently known about physics or biology has an inherently mind-opening effect. (The chemists have to rely on showpersonship, I suppose.)
But there’s a difference between teaching students who may go on into the sciences and those not. If you’re teaching students some of whom may go on into scientific fields, you can’t just have them regurgitate the textbook, any more than you could in the humanities. You have to communicate the essential information that there are things that we don’t know about, everywhere, and that they could start to figure them out to a better degree.
Why did I bring up the avant-garde or aesthetics? Because I think that a lot of the use of these concepts of alienation/defamiliarization goes back to the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century, which had (as far as I understand) this exact goal: defamiliarizing the familiar. From there it got adopted more widely and now it’s all through the contemporary humanities, until what you express above, which might once have been phrased as something like “encouraging creative thought”, is now expressed as defamiliarization.
Perhaps only what one actually does matters and not how one thinks of it. But thinking of it as defamiliarization has its own pitfalls. In the worst cases, I think that it can become parochial; the teacher becomes confident in their ability to teach students to see the ordinary in a new way, so the really extraordinary is never confronted.
Sinthome, I’m not a science teacher either, so I can’t judge to what extent science classes ask students to accept ideas in a rote fashion.
Now, I’m not going to give a blanket criticism of rote learning. Basic skills and fact sets need to be memorized, and we need to have automaticity of recall with them in order to perform higher level thinking. Multiplication tables are the common example, but in literature, we have the rhetorical terms, literary devices, schools of style and thought, basic literary history, and so on. In philosophy, I would imagine that there’s a like set of basic information and functions students would need to memorize and use fairly automatically, whether it’s the elements of logic or the received narrative of philosophical history.
One problem I notice in rote learning at the junior high and high school levels is what I call the “dilemma of the study guide.” Imagine a unit of study—a history lesson on the American Revolution, for instance. Students spend a few weeks learning the key names, the key dates, the causes of the war, the basic military history, the effects of the war, etc. The unit might be rich and imaginative. But when it comes time for the unit evaluation, students and teachers collaborate to strip down the lesson to the “essential facts,” to atoms of knowledge that are recalled automatically. “What are the causes of the Revolution?” “The causes are X, Y, and Z.” “What is the significance of the Battle of Yorktown?” “The significance is blah.”
Now, it’s easy to say to the problem here is that the final evaluation, usually a test, encourages such strip-mining of a topic. So the problem is: how to form a lesson and a method of evaluation that accomplishes two goals: (1) have students master the set of basic skills and information; and (2) have students be able to understand the connections among these skills and fact sets. There is a wide spectrum of content between the two normally given poles (rote learning of facts and “critical thinking"), from basic skills and facts, to cause and effect relationships, to analysis of implications and inference, to perception of connections, patterns, and anomalies, to even higher order modes of metacognition.
I agree, then, that teaching begins with problems, with great questions. But the question is how to scaffold (to use the ed jargon) the student’s growth from teachers posing questions to students posing their own questions. And as I just wrote, this certainly can’t happen if we think of this scaffold only in terms of a binary between rote learning and critical thinking. A dialectical movement between doubt and belief, as Peter Elbow has written, is perhaps the rhythm of education. Students need to learn to play both games: the doubting game and the believing game.
I no longer know what the main idea of this comment is, so I’ll just stop now.
Isn’t the pedagogy-as-alienation idea, and Luther’s problem with it (basically, not thoroughgoing enough because it’s assumed that being alienated equals having some particular substantive position) at heart Weber’s position in “Science as a Vocation”? Teachers can offer (a) vegetables, (b) the means of procuring vegetables, and (c) clarity, in the sense of making clear what follows from what substantive positions with consistency. “In terms of its meaning, such and such a practical stand can be derived with inner consistency, and hence integrity, from this or that ultimate weltanschauliche position”, but science/the teacher offers to Weltanschauungen of his/her own in the classroom. (c) is obviously what Weber thinks is most important: “the primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts—I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions”. Which would mean inconvenient for the student who comes in disaffected and knowing or whatever.
Also, characterizing §24 of B&T as a “phenomenology of the question” seems really tendentious to me. What’s so phenomenological about that?